Should Drinking Age Be 18 Essay

The Drinking Age Should be Eighteen

The current law regarding the drinking age is ineffective and does not do what it is intended to do. The act regarding when people were allowed to drink was set forth in 1984 and by 1988 all fifty states had changed their law to fit according to what the act said. America is one of twelve countries in the world to have their drinking age at 21. This drinking age should change from twenty-one to eighteen because eighteen is the age of adulthood in the United States, in countries where eighteen is the age limit there are fewer casualties and fewer car accidents, and the current law is ineffective because a majority of teens still drink despite the law.

When a person turns eighteen in the United States

In countries where the drinking age is eighteen such as the UK, there are fewer deaths and accidents per year than in the United States where it is twenty-one. Alcohol accounts for 88,000 deaths a year in the United States but in the United Kingdom, the number of alcohol-related deaths was 8,758. There are more than 79,242 deaths due to alcohol in the United States than in the United Kingdom. Alcohol accounts for thirty-one percent of driving fatalities in the United States but in the United Kingdom it only accounts for sixteen percent, that means that the United States has almost doubled the amount of alcohol related driving casualties than that of the United Kingdom. When teens were asked in both countries, sixty percent of teens admitted to drinking before they were eighteen compared to only thirty-eight percent in the United Kingdom (Office for National Statistics, Alcohol Related Deaths in the UK). This is a serious problem that the United States needs to address and if they were to make the age eighteen then maybe the thrill of underage drinking would decrease. If the government were to give younger adults access to alcohol without restricting it then those adults would be less likely to abuse it. If the United States went with the eighteen-year-old age limit like most of the countries in the world then the country would be able to reap the benefits that the other countries have been able to for many